Return Trip to the Stone Age

by JOHN P. MARQUAND

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SOMETIMES on a restless night when I think of my journeyings about the world, it occurs to me that, although I have been to a number of interesting and out-of-the-way places, I have never been able to make any use of travel experience. I have seen the Assam Valley, Bushire in Persia, the Gobi Desert, the Sahara Desert, the Andes, Iceland, Ascension Island, Lake Chad, the Amazon, the Nile, the Ganges, the Colosseum and the Taj Mahal, and a few volcanoes, yet I have brought back no photographs, no notes, no material for a book or travelogue — and no stuffed animals.

Of course I have collected a few memories because you can’t avoid bringing back assortments ol impressions from thousands of miles of travel, but there is a catch here also. If you have moved about long enough, these memories and impressions, once so vivid and indelible, begin merging into each other, until it becomes difficult to recollect whether it happened in Peking, Tokyo, Cairo, or Lima.

This sense of confusion is greatly intensified by air transportation. A few long trips and everything about them becomes so blurred by the shrinkage of distance, that all that is really left is a recollection of airfields, each approximately the same as the other. At a conventional cruising altitude of eight or nine thousand feet, most mountains are inclined to level out, and most terrain, even unexplored Arabia, Central Africa, and the Amazon Valley, has only a map-like appearance. About all one finally learns from extended air travel is that there is a very great deal more water than land on the planet.

I only bring up these facts to show how little fitted I am to make a report on a little-known island that was once widely discussed in the Pacific war news. I should not dream of mentioning a quick trip of mine to the Carolines in a Navy plane, and my four-hour stay on the atoll of Truk about a year and a half ago, if many other so-called Europeans had ever been there. As a matter of fact, only a very few have. Some fliers, some crews from Naval vessels, and a comparatively small number of Marines and other Naval personnel have visited Truk, usually for brief periods since the close of the Japanese war. Also some scientists called there under government auspices a year ago last summer, but aside from these few and usually casual visitors scarcely an American appears to have set fool on any land of this atoll since whaling ships used to winter in this general lagoon in the '70s and ‘80s. In fact from its original discovery it appears improbable that Europeans have lived there for any extended period.

Spain acquired the island group in 1885, but no attempt was made to colonize or develop it. The Germans bought Truk after the Spanish-American War and held it until the Japanese moved in in 1915; the rugged character of its seventy islets offered no opportunity for exploitation, except lor two or three modest coconut plantations.

With the arrival of the Japanese such a heavy veil of secrecy descended upon Truk that the impression grew that a great naval base was building there. Actually no serious military installations were begun until after World War II had started. Though the lagoon afforded a fine, safe anchorage for the Japanese fleet, and though some twenty or thirty thousand troops who could throw up some of the hottest anti-aircraft fire anywhere in the Pacific were there at the time of the surrender, when it emerged from behind its iron curtain Truk was another example of the overextension and ihe basic feebleness of Japanese imperial domination. The Japanese have been shipped away now, and ihe original Micronesian population remains, somewhat scarred and battered by their contacts with various exponents ol Western culture.

To assist the island’s inhabitants, a small unit of Navy Government and a hospital unit are about all that is left now on Truk. The airstrip is closed. Truk’s only communication with the outer world is by water or Navy PBY; the only vessels apt to touch there are rare U.S. Navy supply craft, Truk is a very lonely place again and this is a pity from a tourist’s point of view. The climate, though somewhat warm, is genial and on the whole healthful, and the Truk atoll and the islands, the tips of submerged mounlaintops appearing above the blue waters of the lagoon, form an island group which is one of the most interesling geologically, as well as one of the most beautiful, in the Pacific — or for that mat ter anywhere in the world.

It would take many months to explore the scores of small islands in this group. Their geology, their flora, and especially the varying cultures of their population pose a series of problems and fascinating fields of speculation, and 1 regret that I only stopped for four hours on Moen, one of the main islands in the atoll, but the shortness of my stay gives the place a romantic, dream-like quality.

Much more vivid than my recollection of Truk itself is the transportation that brought me there. Instead of traveling on bucket seats as I had previously on crossing the Pacific, I accompanied five Naval officers aboard a plane formerly assigned to Admiral Nimitz, and no private car could have been more comfortable. On reaching Kwajalein before dawn, it was a pleasant change from past experience to be one of a party met by the commanding officer of this island, and to be taken to his quarters for an adequate breakfast.

In spite of this innovation, Kwajalein was obviously going downhill. It had been a boom town when I had seen it in the early months of 1945, one of the main crossroads of the Pacific, and it was a ghost town now. The temporary barracks, which, except for the runways and roads, crowded nearly every available square foot of this coral islet, were not built for the moist and humid air of the Central Pacific. Every bit of metal on the island was already in advanced stages of corrosion. Water coolers and letter files were crumbling. Typewriters only had a few months’ life span. Even a bronze plaque in the island chapel, placed to commemorate the dead in the island invasion, was already almost illegible. Worse still, the hardware, the nails and screws holding the buildings together, the locks and doorknobs, were all beginning to give way.

In the sudden rainy dawn that followed our arrival, all these facts became dramatically evident. They gave a sense of impermanence, of a vanishing civilization. You had a definite conviction that nothing built by civilized man would remain very long on the Marshalls. What would last longest was obviously the pandanus-thatehed house with beams held together by fibers, and one could not escape the feeling that the Marshallese were waiting hopefully for a new Dark Age which would permit them to put up their huts again.

It all looked much belter from the air. Shortly after the take-off, the sun burned away the overcast, permitting one to look down from a great height on an occasional coral islet. A Pacific atoll is the loneliest sight in the world, but from the air it is one of the most beautiful. From a height, one can perceive all the opalescent color gradations created by the sun, the sand, the coral, and the startlingly clear Pacific water as it touches the first bench of the outer atoll reef and merges into purples and violets and whites around the coral heads and then into the more delicate greens and blues in the shallower lagoon. The ring-like atoll itself with its dazzling w hite sand, its dots of coconut palm, and its unlidy shrubbery of pandanus is thus always surrounded by a mass of changing color. Prom the air it becomes a punctuation mark in an interminable waste of ocean.

There were several of these punctuation marks between the main Marshalls and the Carolines, but. they were only a preview to the Truk formation. Truk, as we approached it in the late forenoon, was completely in the clear, without a wisp of vapor to hide it, rising from the midst of a cobalt and silver sea. Unlike those atolls of the Marshalls, which seldom could have stood more than eight feet above high-tide mark, Truk seemed like a part of a submerged continent.

As our plane began letting down, the lagoon became a large round lake, protected by a circle of barrier reef as perfect almost as if it had been drawn by a geometric compass. There was room for ten navies to anchor in the Truk lagoon, and three good channels through the reef. Rising nearly in the center of this clear and beautifully sheltered body of water were five ancient volcanic peaks, now islands, covered with a deeper, richer, emerald verdure than is common with Pacific islands further north; and, like freckles, there were tinier islands scarcely to be noticed from a circling plane, both inside and outside the coral barrier. The Truk islands, which shelter about 11,000 natives, have names that sound as remote from civilization as they really are—Moen, Dublon, Fefan, Udot, Fala, Tol, Polie, and Onamue.

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As the plane headed toward the island of Moen, which was Truk’s administrative center, as it lost altitude and as the flaps came down, il was possible to see a concrete pier, a crane, and a few abandoned buildings. These were left by the Japanese, and except for some rusted hulls of shipping, were the most impressive signs I saw of the earlier occupation. The airstrip on which we landed a minute later was also Japanese, but the control lower and the Quonset huts and the Quonset roofs of the administration buildings a little way up the hill gave it the customary American look.

Ours was the last plane to come into Truk before the strip was closed, but there was no sign of abandonment that morning. The Naval Island Commander and his staff and the native constabulary and even some Boy Scouts were out to meet the plane. The constabulary were dressed in shorts and wore bluish helmets and were armed with what appeared to be salvaged Japanese weapons. They were well-turned-out and stood at stiff attention, but they looked no more military than the Marshallese. Their features were irregular but agreeable, their eyes dark and intelligent, their height only medium. None had the Grecian, athletic build of the Polynesian, and none possessed his coördination or physical beauty. It was warm on the airstrip, too warm for clothing, and yet I was just as pleased that the Trukese constabulary were not turned out in G-strings. Not one of them would have looked like a beach boy on Waikiki.

As we drove in jeeps from the airstrip to the administration building and the hospital higher up the hill, over a dusty, glary coral road, we were to encounter an experience almost unique in postwar history. Moses Arkana, the chief of the Truk atoll, emerged from his office building — another Quonset hut set up by Naval Government to greet us. The chief wore khaki trousers, a khaki shirt, and sneakers. He was a short, stoutish man in his late fifties and he had a quiet and moderate command of English because in his youth he had shipped before the mast aboard a tramp steamer that had anchored off the atoll.

When we asked if there was anything that he and his people wanted, he made the surprising statement that his people were comfortable and doing very well and that they wanted nothing. When he was asked again if he was sure about this, he said that they would like a few fishhooks. His people had nearly forgotten the art of fishing.

The chief, whose life had been spent under Spanish, German, and Japanese domination, explained that the Trukese had been discouraged from fishing by the Japanese, possibly for reasons of security. Their canoes had been taken from them, and Japanese fishermen had been imported from Okinawa, who had carried on a commercial industry until the outbreak of the war.

It must not be assumed, however, that the Truk islanders follow the hardy seafaring tradition of other Caroline natives. Captain Walter Karig, C.S.N.R., who has recently traveled extensively in these regions, has pointed out to me that the Trukese have always been exporters rather than sailors, using boatmen from Puluwat to carry their processed goods through the Carolines — a fragrant cosmetic oil composed of coconut and frangipani blossoms, and a yellow vegetable dye called turmeric, still used on the atoll, not to mention tortoise shell and pearl shell. They had only done lagoon fishing and had purchased outriggers for the purpose from such canoe-building islands as Mokil.

Now that the natives wanted to fish again in the lagoon, they no longer had boats. They had almost forgotten the fishing grounds and besides, the Japanese, in the months of starvation that had faced them immediately before they surrendered, had dynamited portions of the lagoon and had thinned out the fish considerably. However, Chief Moses was sure they could get some if they could get fishhooks.

We then walked to the small hospital that cared for all the natives on the Truk islands. The Naval doctor in charge was a young man with great enthusiasms. His wife, who had come with him, was a trained nurse. Together with a very few enlisted personnel, they had trained a group of Trukese girls for nursing and Trukese men for orderlies. They were also conducting a general school for health and sanitation, which was designed to send intelligent natives to teach hygiene on the outer islands.

These efforts, the doctor said, were already beginning to bear fruit. Tuberculosis was common in the atoll, but their main problem was the familiar tropical yaws, a filth disease, which was now being controlled largely by the graduates of his school. Infant mortality and death from childbirth were also a Trukese problem. An effort was now being made to bring expectant mothers from the outer islands to the maternity ward, where they would have proper care, but sometimes this was difficult because the outer islanders still had taboos and prejudices and still lived without clothes and other benefits of civilization.

The prize patient in the hospital was suffering from elephantiasis, that lymphatic, glandular disease caused by the bite of the Culex mosquito. He had been picked up by a health team from an outer island and he seemed pleased to exhibit his monstrous deformity, which was going to be treated in a few days by an operation.

There was a road, a circumference of perhaps five miles around the base of the island, built by the Japanese, and very badly built indeed. The jeeps lurched through it dustily. The cone-like hills of Moon rose sharply to the right and mangrove swamps and beaches met the lagoon on the left. The foliage on the island was thick, a preview to the heavier foliage of the Southwest Pacific. Fine large breadfruit trees grow in the valleys, their shiny intricate leaves making rich blots of dark green against the lighter foliage, and there were also luxurious stands of coconuts and dense growths of plantain.

The doctor said that the natives’ diet was like that of any other Pacific islander; fish, plantain, breadfruit, coconut, taro root, and yam. Since the departure of the Japanese, the food situation had been bad because the starving troops had cut the hearts from thousands of coconut palms. There was also a second agricultural menace in the form of a land snail imported by the Japanese for food from the island of Madagascar. This giant African snail, apparently freed from the natural enemies which controlled it in Madagascar, was multiplying in huge numbers and devouring the new leaves of breadfruit trees and attacking the yam patches.

Nevertheless, life was not hard for the Trukese. In their genial climate, no great efforts at agriculture were necessary. Food in the main still dropped from trees, if one wailed long enough beneath them.

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INVASIONS from the outer world may have threatened the balance of life on Truk, but even from the front seat of the jeep, it was possible to lapse into one of those daydreams so apt to overtake visitors to Pacific islands, and to think of the Truk atoll as it must have looked before the first European ships discovered it, bringing such gadgets as iron nails, Christianity, and disease. The lagoon, the steep mountain slopes, and their luxurious verdure must have looked very much as they still do. The influence of the West was superficial, yet curiously blighting.

There were no outrigger canoes, no villages of thatch on Moen. On a causeway running through a mangrove swamp some Trukese were making minor repairs on the road surface, and all were sedately dressed in shirts and trousers in spite of the steamy heat of midday. The doctor explained that missionaries had indoctrinated all natives on the main islands with such a sense of modesty that bodily exposure was most uncommon, and workmen seldom removed their shirts.

The missionaries, it seemed, had done an exceptional job on Truk. There was a story that in 1934, when the Japanese were staging some sort of celebration, they asked if the Moen natives would oblige with their songs and dances, only to discover that these had been forgotten long ago. It was wrong to dance, and the only songs the Trukese knew were some moldy European hymns.

On the far side of the mangrove swamp stood a Trukese settlement. The buildings of this tiny village looked worse than any in an American hobo jungle. They seemed to have been constructed principally from tin cans and packing cases, but after all there was no lumber industry in Truk, and boards and nails were at a premium. Rickety as the buildings were, the natives evidently preferred them to pandanus thatch. The main building was a Catholic church, recently constructed, framed with the wood of the breadfruit tree and roofed with gasoline tins. Two black-gowned Portuguese priests conducted us through it, but barriers of language forbade communication.

Then we climbed halfway up the mountain on a rocky, washed-out road to the Island Commander’s bungalow, where we had lunch. Sitting on his veranda, looking out to sea, we all seemed like transients. The head of the Island Government told of other islands on the atoll and showed us handcrafts — baskets and mats woven from pandanus leaves, a fine cloth woven from vegetable fiber, and wooden masks and models of outrigger canoes. In spite of the closeness of the islands in the atoll to each other, many, he said, were seldom visited and in many there was still a Stone Age civilization. The truth was that Truk had no great natural resources, nothing much a predatory white man would want, except the harbor facilities of its beautiful lagoon, and it might well be that even this would not be wanted either, now that the strategical areas were shifting north.

It was too bad, an officer was saying, that this magnificent anchorage, large enough for adequate dispersal in case of air bombing, could not be towed six hundred miles north, for then it would make a better base than Guam, but there seemed to be no use for Truk in its present situation.

Since the American occupation there is only one Trukese product that has achieved any wide sort of popularity. This is the native love stick, which may still be used on the outer islands but surely not on Moen. The love stick is an intricately carved piece of wood whittled by a native suitor and shown to the girl of his choice, who becomes so familiar with its individual carvings that if the stick is pushed through the thatch of her hut on a dark night, she knows that it belongs to the man of her choice and is glad to join him outside in the starlight. The Naval personnel landing on Truk had carried the story of the love stick over most of the Pacific, so that when we were there, even the sedate natives of Moen were manufacturing them in quantities and they could be bought for twenty-live cents apiece.

As we were due in Manila in time for dinner, it was necessary to leave Truk shortly after luncheon. I can remember the languid heat, the acute sense of loneliness, and my feeling of disappointment at the sight of that jerry-built village. I can remember wondering too what could be more practical than that village and what could possibly be done by an enlightened civilization to make the life of the Trukese happier and more fruitful. Aside from some medical attention, I was not able to think of much.

I could even imagine that the kindest thing the outer world could do for Truk would be to leave it alone. If this idea has any value, perhaps happier days are coming to the atoll, because as one reads the news from China and listens to the rumblings of revolt in the East Indies, it may be that a silence will settle over the Central Pacific, that a curtain of neglect will fall again over Micronesia, and that the natives there will be driven back to their old skills for survival. The rest of the world may be dissecting atoms and cosmic rays, but in Truk they want fishhooks and to learn again how to build and handle a boat in the lagoon.